Asynchronous disaster recovery in Rancher

In asynchronous disaster recovery setup, you can replicate Kubernetes applications and their data between two Kubernetes clusters. Here, a separate Portworx Enterprise cluster runs under each Kubernetes cluster.

The following diagram shows an asynchronous DR setup involving two clusters that are geographically apart:

• Application data and supported Kubernetes resources are asynchronously replicated from a source to a destination cluster, which means there is a delay between data changes occurring on the source cluster and their replication to the destination cluster.
• Incremental changes from Kubernetes applications and Portworx data are continuously sent to the destination cluster.
• In case the source cluster becomes unavailable, you can activate the applications in the destination cluster.

important

Cluster-wide operators are not migrated as part of a DR migration if they are not installed in the same namespace as the applications you want to migrate. As a result, after migration, you will not be able to scale up or down your applications on the destination cluster using storkctl.

Perform the following steps to set up asynchronous DR:

📄 Prerequisites

Prerequisites for Async DR migration.

📄 Prepare your Portworx cluster

Prepare your Portworx cluster for asynchronous DR.

📄 Generate and apply a cluster pair spec

How to pair your clusters.

📄 Schedule a migration

How to set up asynchronous schedules.

📄 Failover an application

How to failover an application from one Kubernetes cluster to another.

📄 Failback an application

Find out how to failback an application from the backup Kubernetes cluster to the original one.